Contemporary Art, Craft and the Politics of Silence

Abstract

Both craft and contemporary art have experienced what might be called a ‘social turn’ over the last two decades. This phrase has been used by the art theorist Claire Bishop (2006) to describe the emergence in contemporary art since the 1990s of works that emphasise participation: where an audience is invited, in some sense, to contribute to the creation of a collaborative artwork. These works are now largely discussed as ‘social practice’ (Jackson 2011; Lind 2012), which is how I will refer to them here. On the face of it, the social turn has brought about a reconciliation between contemporary art and craft. The social turn in art has coincided with the emergence of expanded notions of craft, exemplified in the writings of Richard Sennett (2009). There has also been a resurgence of popular DIY craft, emphasising values of experience, process and collaboration, all of which have also been key terms within social practice. Many conceptual craft practices develop from a synergetic interaction between these developments.

However, this semblance of rapprochement conceals a complex and contradictory relationship. On the one hand, craft is visible within contemporary art and popular craft traditions are in rude health. On the other hand, there remains an element of ‘craft shame’ as Liz Collins (Bryan-Wilson et al. 2010: 621) has described it: evidenced, for example, in the discrete removal of this word from the American Craft Museum (which has become the American Museum of Arts and Design), or recent attempts to reclassify craft in the UK as no longer part of the creative industries.

In this paper, I will try to unravel some issues around the politics of making in the social turn. I hope to show that art of the social turn has moved, in a paradoxical way, towards a way of thinking about community as a kind of immaterial vernacular art. I will suggest that this shift highlights some interesting issues, especially with regard to what I want to call the politics of silence in craft. Here I hope to sketch some thoughts about the relationship between different senses of silence in or as a way of interrogating the idea of the social in art, and craft. Writing in the 1970s, Lucy Lippard was skeptical of attempts to reconcile art and craft. From the point of view of feminism, it seemed that women’s work would always fall at the bottom end of the scale of respectability, as ‘low’ rather than ‘high’ craft. And yet, this for Lippard was part of the enduring power of craft to critique the exclusivity of art: 

'The crafts need only one more step up the aesthetic and financial respectability ladder and they will be headed for the craft museums rather than for people’s homes. … Perhaps until the character of the museum changes, anything ending up in one will remain a display in upper class taste in expensive and dubiously ‘useful’ objects.' (2010: 484)